The Destructive Mentalities of a Disengaged Church

In this series of posts, I’ve been writing about the concept of church mentalities, and particularly the sorts of mentalities that need to be developed if the church is to be meaningfully engaged with the local community. As painful as it may be, we must recognize that we aren’t developing those mentalities in anything like a vacuum. There is no truly clean slate. Rather, we are simultaneously developing one set of mentalities while working to counter destructive mentalities already exerting influence. Mentalities destructive to the church’s purposes are often thoroughly entrenched within the church for a variety of reasons in the personal histories of church members. Any of the potential purposes the Church might take on faces this process of reconstructing the proper mentalities, but here I’m specifically interested in our particular purpose of engagement with the surrounding community and its problems, and what mentalities potentially exist that would be counterproductive to that purpose. Below is my initial list of these potential destructive mentalities that threaten to keep churches disengaged. Truthfully, some of them are foils, but I think others ring true and are closer to home than I like to admit.

1. Service is a painful discipline. You just have to suffer through it, and force yourself to get it done. If it was fun, it wouldn’t be service.

2. We serve because we get something out of it. Service is great for the high school kids’ college applications, our personal resumes, our social lives, and our reputations (particularly in the church). Not to mention the fact that God will someday reward us if we serve!

3. We have what we have because of our hard work. It is God’s way of blessing us for doing things the right way, so that we can enjoy the things he gives us. We don’t owe anything to anybody, really.

4. Evangelism is about helping people obtain forgiveness. Conversion is infinitely more important than “discipleship”. The first steps of the Christian journey are by far the most important, because they involve accepting God’s forgiveness—if people are motionless after that, at least they won’t be going to hell.

5. We are a peaceful and stable church. This is how we’ve grown! When we take new initiatives, we threaten what we’ve spent years building, and threaten the very peace which brought people to our church in the first place.

6. The church is primarily interested in saving souls. Everything else we might do is a vehicle towards that end. We can judge our success by the number of conversions, and if we don’t see many of those, that we can at least hope that we have planted the seed of the gospel in their mind so that it will eventually bear fruit.

7. Service is a special gift of some christians. It’s great that god has given some people such servant hearts. It’s the job of the rest of the church to encourage and support those people.

8. We want to support our people in service. The best (or only) candidate for a partner is the one who thinks like we do, talks like we do, and practices like we do.

9. Most people’s problems are a result of their own sin. If they hadn’t made some bad decisions, they wouldn’t need our help. In fact, most people asking for help are probably abusing the system. They’ll probably go to hell even more because of that.

10. Commonality leads to friendship. Our best friends are people with whom I have common interests, common ideas, and a similar background. In fact, we’ve probably already been friends for a while.

11. It’s us against the world. The world is full of so much corruption that it’s better to isolate ourselves from it, and make sure not to associate ourselves with evil of any kind.

In some ways these might stand as opposites of the mentalities that encourage community engagement, so that they constitute poles on the opposite side of a spectrum. Alternatively, we might understand these mentalities as threads within the tapestry that makes up our mindsets as individuals and as a group with a corporate identity. Within that tapestry are threads of many different hues, some of which are brighter, some are darker. In other words, some of these darker threads might exists alongside lighter threads, and it is a blending of light and dark threads of many colors that influences our thoughts, actions, feelings, and words in particular moments and over time. Part of our work in creating a good “working” tapestry is developing positive mentalities, in other words, weaving lighter strands into the fabric. On the other hand, there may be darker threads that need to be pulled, removed from the tapestry.

I suspect these destructive mentalities might be more controversial than the positive set. I’m not sure I even agree with how negative a couple of them are. I would very much welcome your comments, whether in agreement or civil dissent. Help me think.

5 thoughts on “The Destructive Mentalities of a Disengaged Church”

You don’t have to go much farther than Matt 5:43-48 to see the problem with the majority of the fatal mentalities you listed.

43″You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

We aren’t to do “anything” from a self-serving, isolationist, unloving attitude. Nor for “the reward”. We are to be a reflection of God in the world. “be perfect, as God is perfect”.

Doubtless we will not acheive perfection, but that’s the goal. God loves EVERYONE. Yes, even murderer’s, alcoholics, women who leave their husbands, men who don’t pay child support, people on welfare, people who enter other countries illegally, people who hate God, and on and on.

We often limit God’s love to placate our own beliefs about who we should love and serve.

Understanding & accepting God’s love for all is the beginning to being able to love all.

Karen, thanks for the comment! No doubt my current thinking on these mentalities is heavily influenced by my current focus on the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6, the parallel passage to the one you cite here. Indeed, I hope it influences my thoughts even more heavily going forward!

This is so hard to read. I think I’ve experienced all of those first hand. The worst thing is that each myth has a small grain of truth in it. Sure, service isn’t always fun. Sure, sometimes we get stuff in return. It’s the absolute nature of these ideas that try to simplify the world–and even God himself–into this tiny rigid box.

Thanks, Marcus! I think some of them (#1, 7, 10) have more than a grain of truth in them! The metaphor may even be the other way around—a small grain of falsehood, just taking the mentality off center enough to become distorted. Often it may not even be truth/falsehood that marks the mentality as destructive or creative, but the matter of emphasis.

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